Three Vet Visits, One Answer: How Telehealth Helped Us Avoid a Fourth

I want to write about money because most pet stories skip over it, and it's usually the actual reason people delay getting help, not lack of concern.

Our dog Max, a cocker spaniel, gets recurring ear infections — it's a known thing with the breed given how their ears are shaped, we learned after the fact. Over about four months, we'd been to our vet three separate times for the same basic issue: ears flare up, we go in, get drops, it clears up, then a few weeks later it's back. Each visit ran somewhere between $85 and $150 depending on whether they needed to do a swab test that time. Call it $600 total, conservatively, across the four months.

When it flared up a fourth time, I was frustrated enough to actually think about what we were doing wrong instead of just going back in for round four. I used the Waggle video vet mostly to ask a bigger-picture question rather than a "help right now" one: why does this keep happening, and are we missing something about how we're managing it at home.

The vet looked at his ears over video, asked how we'd been cleaning them between flare-ups — turned out we weren't doing any regular maintenance cleaning at all, just treating flare-ups as they came, which she said was likely why it kept recurring. She walked me through a specific at-home ear cleaning routine and schedule, what product to use, and how to actually do it without stressing him out, something no one had taken the time to show us in a rushed in-person appointment.

We've had one flare-up in the eight months since, versus one every few weeks before. That's not a hypothetical savings — I did the math, and between avoided visits and the actual cost of one video consult, we're genuinely hundreds of dollars ahead, plus a dog who isn't dealing with itchy ears every month.

This isn't a story about avoiding the vet — we still see our regular vet for actual issues and checkups. It's about the fact that a lot of recurring, non-emergency problems get treated reactively because the in-person visit format doesn't always leave room for the "why does this keep happening" conversation. Telehealth, for us, ended up being the tool that actually solved the underlying pattern instead of the symptom each time.

If you're trying to figure out in the moment whether something's worth a visit at all, this is how we've learned to make that call.